


Wanted, Full Stop

by FlyingMocha



Category: The Grand Tour (TV) RPF, Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-12-06 03:47:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11592300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlyingMocha/pseuds/FlyingMocha
Summary: "You are the incredible, wonderful person I've chosen to spend my life with, Richard.  These things happened to you, but they are not part of who you are.  I love you, and there's nothing anyone else could ever do to make me stop."WARNING: Contains references to past abuse.  See full trigger warning in the notes for more information.





	Wanted, Full Stop

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: People who are concerned about triggers, you need to know that this story is about telling a loved one about a past experience of hazing and sexual assault. It is NOT about the experience itself, but the characters talk about it, so... yeah. This story explores what it can feel like to come to grips with this type of information, to share it for the first time, and what it can be like for a loved one to hear it. The entire experience is summarised in two sentences, and discussed with as minimal detail as I could manage. Later in the story, UK law pertaining to these issues is summarised and discussed a bit. You also need to know, I've been clued in that my writing style is emotionally... er, intense, and gripping. If you're not familiar with my style, and you're concerned about triggers, maybe take a look at one of my other works to get a feel for it before you decide.
> 
> Disclaimer and whatever: This is 100% fiction. It was written in response to a request from a friend. I wrote this for my other work, Sanctuary, then decided to completely redo it, so if you're following that one, eventually you'll see a chapter that looks suspiciously similar to this story. I wasn't going to release this version, but then I decided that maybe someone needs to hear a story like this one, like my friend did. So I changed my mind, and here it is. Oh, by the way, in this story, James and Richard are living together, in a long-term relationship, not polyamorous, and so forth.

Richard sat quietly on the sofa, slowly turning a beer bottle in his hands. He'd promised at around three o'clock this morning, that tonight he would share the reason why he'd been having nightmares. Now that tonight had come, he really would have preferred anything but. Maybe if he drank enough, he could pass out and avoid the conversation… but he knew that wouldn't be tolerated by his concerned, overprotective partner.

So instead, he twirled the bottle slowly in his hands, feeling the way the label caught on his skin, dragging roughly across the ridges of his fingerprints. James sat on the opposite end of the sofa, facing him, mirroring his cross-legged pose as they both sat sideways on the furniture. Unable to take the expectant stare any longer, Richard reached over to the table behind the sofa and turned off the lone lamp that had been illuminating the room, plunging them into almost-darkness. He could still see James' outline in the glow from… moonlight? Street lamps? Whatever. He knew he had to talk soon, before his eyes adjusted and he'd be able to see James almost as well as he could with the light on.

Richard drew in a deep breath and then began, with a marked tremble in his voice, to share the story of the secret initiation rites he endured to gain acceptance among his peers, in his teen years. He pictured himself unpacking a box, taking each detail out, identifying it, and setting it aside before reaching for the next. He told the story of other boys locking him in a supply closet at lunchtime, of being dressed in a girl's school clothes and locked in the girls' loo, forced to eat disgusting concoctions of… of flavors and textures that were never intended to be combined, and then finally, at the end of it all, he unpacked the deepest, darkest layer of his memory box -- the stories about being touched under his clothing, accused of being gay after being teased to very predictable teenage hair-trigger orgasms, being held down while other boys invaded his body with various sizes of test tubes stolen from the chemistry lab, and one concerningly unmemorable incident in which, based on the way his body felt afterwards, he was fairly certain he'd been forced to perform oral sex. These were the things his brain tormented him with, in what was supposed to be the peaceful comfort of night.

Once he was done, the silence was unbearable. After several seconds, Richard chanced a glance up, flinching and casting his eyes immediately back down to his lap when he did. His eyes had adjusted to the dark enough that he was pretty sure he could see the look of disgust on his partner's face. Not disgust that he wasn't virginal when they had met -- it wasn't the first relationship for either of them, after all. But he must have been just as disgusted with Richard as Richard was with himself, that he'd allowed these things to happen, that he'd let people touch his body so casually, that he hadn't said no, hadn't fought… that he was so pathetic, so unutterably defective, he'd had to endure all those things for most of a year before he was deemed worthy of acceptance by the other boys.

"Oh, Richard," James breathed, finally breaking the silence. Richard flinched, keeping his gaze down to avoid seeing the look of disappointment. "You were raped."

"What?" Richard said, his own voice louder than he'd expected in the quiet darkness. "That's ridiculous, I'm not a girl! Don't ever say that again!" His hands tightened into fists seemingly of their own accord, coming down hard on the sofa cushion as they expressed their owner's anger. He jumped, hard, when two hands rested on his shin.

"You don't have to be a girl," James said in a patient tone.

"Sure you do," Richard said. "A man can't-- it's not possible--" he fell silent in the face of a loud groan of frustration coming from his companion. Then he squeezed his eyes closed as the whole room seemed to light up with the comparably bright light coming from James' phone screen.

"From the Cambridge dictionary, rape: to force someone to have sex when he or she is unwilling. It even says, he or she. From British legal code, consent is defined as agreeing to participate, and having the freedom and capacity to do so. As a child under age 16, you did not have the capacity to give consent, and as someone whose opinion was not solicited, you were not free to give consent. That includes all sexual activity with a non-consenting person, with any object at all, even test tubes. It even includes agreeing to use a condom, and then not doing so, or intentionally damaging it. Richard, what part of your experience disagrees with this information?"

"You're completely misinterpreting what I said; it was harmless hazing, everyone goes through it." James rolled his eyes at Richard's non-answer.

"Twenty years later you're still having nightmares about it, Richard," James pointed out. "We're sitting in the dark because you couldn't bring yourself to tell me with the light on, and even still, you can't bear to look at me. That's not the result of a harmless initiation rite; you know better than that. Now, what part of your experience doesn't match the definitions and information I read to you?"

The room fell quiet for several long seconds as James waited for an answer, for the next step in the struggle between avoiding and accepting what his partner almost certainly already knew was the truth.

"The part where I came," Richard said, sullen and quiet. James let out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding. He'd halfway expected this answer, but it still took him a moment to gather his thoughts. The mere thought of the serious problem Richard had, evidently, been trying to handle in complete secrecy for all these years, was almost more than James could bear. He pushed that unhelpful thought out of his mind and focused just on his partner's words, on Richard's current explanation for why he was to blame for what happened.

"That is a biological response to stimuli," James explained, his patient tone carrying a slight undertone of irritation, as if he were explaining this to a child who should really know better. "It can and does happen regardless of willingness, to women, to men, to teenage boys in the middle of the night… it happens, and it's not a sign of willing participation." James fell silent for a moment. "Richard? Do you understand?" Richard shrank down slightly in his place, but he nodded and hummed in the affirmative. "Would you like to come sit on my lap?"

That didn't take Richard nearly so long to respond to. He almost immediately set the unwanted beer bottle on the coffee table and crawled across the small space to settle between James' outstretched legs, resting his back against his partner's chest. James ran his hands from Richard's shoulders down to his wrists, grasping them gently and wrapping their now-joined arms around Richard's middle, resting his chin gently on his partner's shoulder. "You were raped, Richard," he said softly, again, holding tightly against the angry, tensed ball of muscle in his lap, as Richard tried again to break free from this new reality he'd been so unceremoniously dumped into.

"No," Richard said, much less strenuously this time. "Noooo…" Acceptance was so close, James felt like he could see it, feel it, taste it.

"Yes, Rich, yes. I read you the definition, I explained the law, you know this to be true. Yes." James winced in sympathetic pain, knowing how hard this must be. He wondered if Richard was as near tears as he was, as they discovered this new information together. It was so hard to gauge the younger man's thoughts in the dark.

After a long minute, James felt motion against his ear, the sensation of hair brushing his skin as Richard moved -- a nod. A small one, but it was a nod. Now, now he was ready, finally. "You were raped, Sweetheart," James whispered once more. This time the nod was a little more sure. "Can you say it for yourself?" That provoked him to shake his head. James had expected that; it couldn't be easy to come to terms with this new understanding of his life experiences. James was familiar with the statistics about how few sexual assaults are thought to be reported to police, and how many of those reports occur long after the fact. There were many reasons for that, he knew, but he wondered if one of them might be the bewilderment, disbelief, and deep pain involved in just coming to terms with those words and the changed perception of one's life that came with.

What he hadn't quite expected was the deep sob that filled the room, sounding like something out of a torture scene, or an unusually graphic war movie. Torture wasn't far from the truth, James decided. The pain must be unbearable; he was pretty sure it would be if it were him going through this. He let go of Richard's wrists to stroke his forearms soothingly, only to have the smaller man turn to face the back of the sofa, sitting sideways in his lap. James tried not to grunt in pain as the flurry of motion forced his knee to bend a bit backwards. After a momentary struggle with limbs that were too long for the small space he was trying to fit into, Richard managed to settle in an awkwardly comfortable pose that made James feel like he was trying to cradle the world's largest toddler. Richard's arms wrapped around him in a childlike hug as he pressed his nose against James' chest.

James felt Richard's tears soaking into his shirt, warm and then cool as the moisture conducted his body heat away from his skin. He settled into a motion that at once felt utterly new and completely familiar, rocking gently from side to side as he ran his fingers across Richard's forehead and through his hair. He stroked the tense muscles he could feel around his partner's temple, and above his ear, ignoring the angry, grief-stricken tears gliding freely along the contours of his own cheeks. Blindly, he grabbed the tissue box that he knew was on the table behind the sofa, finding it and slipping it into Richard's lap. Together they made use of what seemed like half the box. In the course of maybe twenty minutes, decades of pent-up emotion flooded out of Richard's heart and soul as James used touch and soft words of encouragement to pour love and support over him in the hopes of helping to ease the pain that threatened to devour them both.

After a long while, the tears slowed, the sobs gave way to sniffles, and Richard turned his gaze up to find James' eyes. James met him with a soft, encouraging smile that he hoped would banish whatever embarrassed, uncertain, unutterably vulnerable feeling was probably running riot in Richard's heart, as he continued stroking Richard's hair. Richard simply watched him for a minute, a blank look on his face. Tapping into what James remembered from years-ago research on the topic after a sort-of-maybe-girlfriend had shared her own secret with him, James worked to restore his partner's sense of value, beginning with a gentle hand on Richard's cheek and feather-light kisses on his forehead.

"You are loved, and wanted, valuable and treasured beyond any measure you can possibly imagine," James said softly. "You are the incredible, wonderful person I've chosen to spend the rest of my life with, and nothing can change that. These things happened to you, but they are not part of who you are. I love you. What you've survived in life has no bearing on that. None. Do you understand me, love?" Richard nodded, fresh tears spilling over his cheeks, although this seemed more like relief than pain.

James knew this was not the kind of thing that one evening and some well-chosen words could fix. He knew he likely had an unrealistic concept of how long and how hard the path was that those boys had condemned him to helping Richard walk along, and that he might as well resign himself right now to spending an inordinate amount of time and money sitting around in a psychologist's office over the next… year, he decided randomly, just to frame it in his mind that this injury would have a long healing process. But they had to start somewhere, and tonight he was just relieved that his partner was both willing and able to take that first step and believe that he was neither responsible for the experience nor unlovable because of it.

"Can I turn the lamp back on?" Richard asked after a few moments. James hummed his agreement, then flinched slightly as illumination returned to the room. He knew this story had taken a toll on them, but now, he could see how badly rumpled and tear-soaked their shirts both were, could see the pile of tissues on the table behind the sofa… the pain in his partner's eyes.

"James..?" Richard said after a few moments. He sounded frightened, James observed.

James brushed Richard's hair back and rested his palm on the younger man's cheek. "Yes?"

"James…" Richard started again, his voice cracking slightly. His eyes slid downward, breaking eye contact, but then he forced himself to look back up, the fear and pain evident in his eyes, but a thread of determination joined in after a moment. "James," he began yet again, "I was raped." Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, James felt amusement bubble up at the way Richard had pushed the words out all at once, as if they would burn his tongue if allowed to linger even a millisecond. Probably for the best, his amusement was unable to fight its way to the surface amidst the broken-hearted sense of rage he felt for his partner's past experiences. Richard let out a shuddery breath as he pressed his face against James' chest yet again. The admission had taken all of the strength that James had poured out over him through the overwhelming expressions of love, James realised as he began the task of filling Richard's injured heart all over again, with secure arms holding him close and an avalanche of kisses all over his face. It was a good thing that secretly, when they were alone in the privacy of their own home, James had an endless appetite for this touch business.

"Yes, you were," James whispered near Richard's ear. "I'm so proud of you for getting through it, and very thankful that you felt safe enough to share this information with me."

After a few minutes in which Richard shamelessly soaked up all the attention he could get, he shot an uncertain look at the elder man. "Now what?" he asked. James chuckled gently.

"In the next few days, we should probably think about finding a psychologist or… whoever it is that's supposed to help clean up the mess those boys left," James answered carefully, unsure of how open Richard would be, to that suggestion. When it wasn't met with an argument, he breathed a little easier, and continued. "Until then… I don’t know, love, what do you want?" Richard only shrugged at that question. James had the sense that he knew what Richard wanted, and that the shrug might be because he felt unsure about asking. "We could just do this for the rest of the night," he said. The look of fearful hope in the brown eyes that peered up at him, told James everything he needed, to know what to say next. "We could do it for the rest of the week, if you want."

"Maybe not the entire week," Richard answered with a small smile, "but all right." James grinned at that. This was going to be hard on them both, he knew, but now that he understood what his partner was dealing with, they could get through this.


End file.
